Selling the Importance of Facility Preventive Maintenance

Update: Another selling point is that CMMS is integral to enterprise risk management. Read more here. 

If you've been in the facilities business for more than a couple of years, you've probably heard horror stories of deferred maintenance which reached the critical stage, with sometimes (unfortunately) spectacular results. For example, there's the fire that closed the Milwaukee County Courthouse and adjoining Safety (!) Building a couple of weeks ago. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the “47-year-old electrical system [was] 'approaching or beyond its life expectancy.'” In addition to the costs to repair and re-open the facility, there was the cost to pay 1000 county workers for days when they had to stay home because the building was not safe to work in.

Despite the fact that stories like this are all too common, you probably have trouble getting approval to address facility preventive maintenance in order to forestall the kind of disaster facing folks in Milwaukee right now (and yes, the maintenance staff is certainly still dealing with the aftermath of the fire, even if it’s no longer on the front pages of the paper). It’s pretty difficult to get leadership in most organizations to pay attention to the need for preventive maintenance because nothing is “wrong” and they prefer to spend money on things they can see, like redecorating the reception area to match the hair color of the new receptionist.

Fortunately, there are some great words you can use to get their attention. Here are a few we suggest you try on for size.

• “Regulatory Compliance” – Check with the folks in your Government Contracts Department and get a quick tutorial on how to throw those words around. You’ll find that scaring leadership with the possible threat to those lucrative government contracts can get them to pay attention to making sure that the seals are still functional on all the doors and windows to the lab where the prime research team is conducting those hush-hush chemical experiments.
• “Lawsuit” – Have a chat with the folks in Legal and find out how to talk about the lawsuits that your company would face if someone was injured on the job because those back stairs finally collapsed when everyone exited the building during your monthly fire drill.
•  “Cost-Benefit Analysis” – Ask someone in Accounting to help you develop one of these. Your facility preventive maintenance software can helpfully illustrate exactly what needs to be done and when, and Accounting can help you compute the cost to replace the building, or a portion of it, should something catastrophic happen because the simple preventive maintenance steps were not taken.

So grab a copy of the latest deferred maintenance disaster news article, along with your phone or tablet with our preventive maintenance software, and go sell the importance of facility preventive maintenance. When it works, contact us to share your success story.